Tracking Income and Expenses with Mint

For many years I paid for Quicken to track my expenses.  It's about $50 to purchase, and while I loved the way it worked, I got tired of having to upgrade it every year or two to keep the features.  They would force you to upgrade or they would stop downloading transactions.  Even though I was happy with what it offered before the upgrade, part of what I liked about Quicken was keeping the transactions up to date.

I decided that in retirement, and re-evaluating the way we spent our money, it was an expense I could eliminate.

I decided to try Intuit's Mint.  It's totally free, and if you just enter your banking information into their secure site, the program downloads and syncs transactions for you every day.  It's always current, practically to the minute.    It even works with your investments, AND allows you to enter loans as well as assets.

In trying to be prepared for filing my taxes the first quarter of 2019, I decided to scroll through all of my transactions for 2018 and make sure they were categorized correctly.   They have plenty of standard categories to choose from, but you can also create your own.  Under income, for example, I can designate what comes from Social Security, or my Etsy shop. 

Once you set the category for an expense, like electricity, it will generally continue to put that payee in the same category, but one thing that I realized I needed to change was payments to credit cards.  For example, we have a Wal-Mart card that we use primarily for fuel because we get a discount by using it.  We pay it off every month.  In my register, however, it was showing Wal-Mart payments as "shopping."  I was able to go in and change that to "Transfer:  Credit Card Payment."   If I wanted to, I could create another category that read, "Transfer:  Credit Card Payment to Wal-Mart."

While you can set budgets in Mint, I have also found that it helps to have a spreadsheet to see what expenses I have coming up.   For instance, I will enter my income and dates it should be deposited, and list all of the expenses for the month.  I usually have about three months entered at any time, so that I can see that on those rare times that I have extra money, I still can't spend it because I have an expense coming up later.   While it would be great to look at that balance and think I have extra to spend, usually that is not the case. 

Mint will allow you to go in and add future transactions, and then when they come in, they will match up, but I have found that it is a bit time consuming.  I like using the spreadsheet.  While it may seem like double work, it helps me stay on track.  I just have columns for:

Date
Payee
Deduction
Deposit
Balance
Bank Balance

And then I do a formula to keep a running balance at all times.  I just have to be careful to include the deductions as a negative number!  One time I thought I had loads of money in the account, only to discover that I'd entered them as a positive.

When checking in with Mint, I will enter the balance the bank shows, and then use another column to add my balance plus any outstanding transactions to make sure we agree.

These may seem like extra steps, and perhaps you have a better way of doing it, but it really helps me have a good snapshot of where my money is going. 

By the way ... while going through personal files and documents, this is a great time to record information that would be helpful to you in the event of an evacuation, or for your family in the event of your absence.  My ebook, All They'll Need to Know, is a quick download, and available on my Etsy shop for $9.95.    You can get started today and enter the information from your computer.  

Year-End Medical Expenses

As the year starts winding down, I've started thinking about what I'll need to file my taxes for 2018.  Having given up our business and retired two year ago, this will be the first year that my only concern will be our personal income and expense.  I won't need the help of my CPA to file my taxes and am excited to download Turbo Tax and do it on my own.

This week I went through a pile of receipts that needed scanning.  We've had a lot of dental expense this year - a total of two root canals, a couple of fillings, and two crowns - and I wanted to see if we had enough to use the medical expenses as a deduction.

I started a spreadsheet and went through not only receipts, but checking account and credit card information to see what documentation I had.  At one time I used Quicken to track everything, but in retirement and cutting unnecessary expenses, I find that Intuit's free version, Mint, works just fine.  Next, I logged each expense for these categories, including the date of service and payee.

I might add that while some of our doctor's visits only cost us $5, and often we just pay cash, it's important to keep the receipts.  We use our debit or credit cards for almost everything, and I like to do that because it's easier to keep track, but if you pay cash, don't forget about those payments.

Doctor
Dentist
Prescriptions
Hospitals
Insurance (Medicare)

Doctor expenses were minimal.  We fortunately don't have to take any regular medications, so this was just for drugs prescribed for short-term illnesses.  My husband had a one night stay in the hospital and that was a whopping $75.   Insurance, which for us is Medicare, is broken down at the end of the year on our Social Security statement.  I looked at the amount we claimed last year, and since there were no changes, I'm expecting it to be the same.  However, I will adjust when we get the final this year, just in case.

I'm off to a good start.  Hoping that we don't have anything to add to that in the last two weeks of the year, I already have a good idea of what I can claim for medical expenses.

Stay tuned for more as I work on our taxes.

By the way ... while going through personal files and documents, this is a great time to record information that would be helpful to you in the event of an evacuation, or for your family in the event of your absence.  My ebook, All They'll Need to Know, is a quick download, and available on my Etsy shop for $9.95.   You can get started today and enter the information from your computer.